Tag Archive: Reports

I am patriot, there is no doubt about it at all but, this is one is a big but, butting in between my love for the country, the tech sphere and the state of services provided. Every now and then we get big names stepping in the Internet scene promising big, delivering, well a bread crumb to the say the most. I am preparing myself to flood accusations at my Internet Service provider, Wateen Telecom for providing a service that is nothing less than crap. Oh, and the customer support is equally pathetic, sending those SMS updates with excuses for the service breakdowns.

Today ended on a very low energy after it started with a lot of buzz for Pakistan’s first Blog Awards as we reported earlier. While the joy was there for the ceremony, a pretty horrendous incident marked the day as Lahore was attacked by terrorists, killing over 60 people. There were concerns over security but the evening ended on a rather sorrowful note.

Now how lucky you can get? At first I thought this was some prank but Alec Brownstein definitely deserves an applause for getting himself working at Y&R New York by simply buying $6 Google Ad words in the name of a creative director Ian Reichenthal at 10 cents a click. Alec created ads for numerous creative heads and got interviewed by almost all of them [except one].

We are all aware of what has been happening in the last couple of weeks, other than Facebook of course. Apple’s engineer lost what is potentially dubbed as the next generation of iPhone [iPhone 4G], how Gizmodo got its hands on it and had the Web stirring with its videos, photos, etc. And the latest news of police raiding Jason Chen’s house and confiscating his property. Obviously his house wasn’t raided because he is a part of some criminal organization, but Apple is the one who is watching all this and made this happen.

We all know that the gadget was forgotten by the engineer who had himself drunk at a party in some pub, the phone was later found by a person who tried to call in Apple and report a stolen device. Getting no response from the customer support he found his way to Gizmodo where the devil’s advocate purchased the device for $5,000. A huge sum that paid off well not just to Gizmodo, but to Apple’s new product. Oh yes, it definitely put a dent on Apple’s reputation of keeping its products a secret till WWDC and its magic time of revelation at 09:41. But I am really glad it happened, systems got to break and Apple has had it going for quite a long time.

Here comes a big news and this has everything to do with whatever I have been talking on Startup Meme about Privacy, confusion, checking who signs up and verification. The Computer World reports of a Russian hacker by the name of Kirllos has a mammoth 1.5 million Facebook accounts at his disposal. And guess what, the guy has them out on a loot sale [more on this form my friend Jadoon].

I know many of you are going to come back at me and mock me writing about Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc. I take that positively and honestly there are things that you can’t turn a blind eye to. Especially news that matters and should be shared.

Eric Larson, the arctic explorer became the first person in the history of the world to send a Tweet from North Pole. The exploration was a part of his one year project called Save the Poles, the purpose of which is to raise awareness about Global Warming. The man is in high spirit after trekking through the isolated and icy region and tweeting from the Pole:

We all have been in love with Facebook for the many features it provides its users with, a vast opportunity for developers to leverage it platform for apps, etc. And while that wasn’t enough it has grown into an equally massive marketing platform for brands and even tourism for countries. But to be honest many actually have loved it more for the very private network it has been over time. Is it really the reason or at least one of the major reasons why it has been loved?

For me, a definite yes and I might have many agreeing with this. I mean why would people fight over privacy issues if its privacy was not their major concern? We have seen it over time that whenever there has been an alteration in privacy settings of the network. And the same is going to repeated if Facebook does proceed with its action to introduce more changes to privacy, the latest of the moves appears to be pretty mind boggling to begin with.

If news from Facebook never ceases to amuse you, this one might. A woman on Facebook had her home ransacked by burglars. The reason she claims this happened was because she left a status update which said she wont be home all night. The woman was obviously way too overjoyed to be going out dancing with her fiancé that she let the world know about it. Sadly it got way further than just informing her friends.

The same night her entire home was robbed off expensive goods and everything was filmed by security cameras. Apparently a friend of hers on Facebook thought her absence to be a golden opportunity and her status update an indication that she is leaving the ground open for an assault. The footage helped identify one man to be from her list of Facebook friends, surprisingly she said she hadn’t seen the same guy in over years. Wow, talk about blindly trusting people who send you friend requests and you accepting them for no apparent reason.

There has been a plethora of reports of murder, blackmailing, torture and even divorces all stemming from the activity on the social network, Facebook. Sad to say the least and I really wont reminisce over all the reports earlier. At the same time I won’t single Facebook as being the only social network that is the source of all such trouble, the question is are these platforms so real in our real lives?

We all would have an obvious answer, no. Rightly said but I know people personally who value as much they value anything in their daily lives, and by taking it real I mean that they take it very seriously. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace is more of a reputation and not just a means of connection with friends, like minded or whatever you do online. These folks wont joke and would readily bite you if you do through a joke at them. Same goes for the jesters, while these two categories remain pretty harmless and can be interesting every now and then, there are more sinister folks who spy, follow and allure you into a trap. The worst part, you have no idea what is running in their heads or what they want to do, there is an absence of emotional expression, eye contact or even voice. What you have are just textual impressions of what the person might be or thinking about. Rest is up to you to decide, trust them, associate stories and make judgments or simply ignore. I guess not all are so much in control of their emotions.

Facebook has outgrown Google. Love it or hate it, it’s a fact now, as Compete reports that the social networking site generates more traffic for sites like MSN, AOL and Yahoo. And those traffics stats are more than what search engines bring to these websites. No doubt Google amalgamated all its services under the umbrella of Social network; Google Buzz.

The stats provided by Compete are very interesting as well. The social networks combined brought around 15% of all traffic to online portals like Yahoo, AOL and MSN which was twice as much as Google brought [around 7%]. However, of those stats, Facebook was the unchallengeable name as it alone generated 13% of all traffic for these sites combined. I am not going to brag about the stats much and would rather talk about what this means and how significant is all this at present and what it says about the future?